Wikis are a great tool for collaboratively creating collections of knowdledge. Wikipedia is arguably the worlds most important free knowdlge project with many tens of thousands active contributors and more traffic then all but a few other sites. But although it's great as a conventional encyclopedia, it leaves quite a bit to be desired when it comes to making all the data it contains usable in other forms.

Wikipedia runs on MediaWiki, worlds most popular wiki software, which is free and open source, allows everyone who wants to set up their own wiki. Semantic MediaWiki is an extension to MediaWiki rthat allows you to store data in a structured fashion within your wiki, which enables querying this data and process/visualize it in all kinds of interesting ways.

Starting April 2012, a team of developers at Wikimedia Germany (one of the non-profit organizations behind Wikipedia), will start working on a big new project to bring similar capabilities to Wikipedia. This project is called WikiData and will involve creating a new wiki that will hold data, much like Wikimedia Commons holds media info, that can be used by any of the Wikipedias.

This talk will introduce you to Semantic MediaWiki, focusing on what it can do for you, and how it works, and will then go into the plans for the WikiData project.